


Infant Safety Protocol

by la_dissonance



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: A missing episode where nothing bad happens and they have a nice time dealing with this baby, Accidental Baby Acquisition, Age Regression/De-Aging, Gen, Team Feels, of a sort, set sometime in S1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-14 02:41:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12998067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_dissonance/pseuds/la_dissonance
Summary: "That's a baby," Dutch said, when she found herself able to speak."Oh good, I'm not hallucinating." Johnny slumped against the doorway. "Or wait, maybe it's bad.""Definitely bad," Dutch agreed. "Hallucinations are definitely preferable to real, live, human babies."





	Infant Safety Protocol

**Author's Note:**

  * For [antonomasia09](https://archiveofourown.org/users/antonomasia09/gifts).



> Antonomasia, I hope this ticks some of the boxes on your yuletide wishlist! It was super fun to write. 
> 
> Thank you to my lovely betas TheWrongKindOfPC and eledhwenlin!

Dutch was in a rare good mood. An excellent night's sleep, a nice simple job, and Lucy's unobtrusive announcement that they were fifty minutes out from Westerly — she couldn't remember the last time any of their plans had gone so smoothly. 

There had been a bit of a scuffle on the abandoned asteroid base where their thief had holed himself up, and a tiny false alarm with an ancient malfunctioning security field, but Johnny had managed to deactivate it well before it would have fried Dutch and D'avin. Probably fried. He'd said there were so many components missing it was a wonder it worked at all. 

But that was just the exciting parts. Most of the warrant's allotted 48 hours had gone into the long haul out to the base and back, with nothing better to do than drink, play cards, and sleep. It honestly felt like being on vacation. 

The ticker on the warrant showed a solid two hours and change until their time expired, plenty of time for a nice leisurely morning. Maybe Dutch would make a cup of tea after checking on the prisoner and the giant crate of tech he stole, see if Johnny wanted to go over the plans to refit Lucy's stabilizers. With the number of warrants the three of them were pulling in now, they could afford a non-essential upgrade or two.

She got as far as far as trading a few pointed barbs with the prisoner — still secured in the cargo bay, still a scumbag — and was just putting a flask of water on to heat when Johnny wandered out of his cabin, rubbing his eyes and yawning. 

Dutch grinned. "Look who's finally up! Welcome back to the land of the living."

"That would work a bit better if I hadn't heard you get up five minutes ago," Johnny said. He gave D'avin's closed cabin door a pointed look. "Save it for when Dav decides to rejoin us."

"Fine, you caught me," Dutch said. She was in a generous mood. "Want some tea?"

Johnny accepted the tea with a half-stifled yawn. "How's our guest holding up?"

Dutch shrugged. "Still going on about the sovereignty of the individual and personal property rights, just like last night. I told him to take up with whoever exercised their personal rights to take out a warrant on him and that stuff he took." 

Johnny chuckled. "We're sure he took it, right?"

"Oh, please. Nobody goes into philosophical arguments over stuff they already own."

Twenty minutes later, there still hadn't been a peep from Dav's cabin. Dutch wouldn't have thought anything of it, but Johnny kept glancing up at the door suspiciously every few minutes. 

"Dav didn't hit his head during the fight, did he?" Johnny asked, in the tone he used when he cared a lot more than he wanted to let on.

Calling it a fight was a bit generous. "Not that I saw, why?" 

Johnny poked at the readout of stabilizer specs for a minute before answering. "No reason. You don't think he went berserk again while we were sleeping and knocked himself out, do you?"

"Too soon," Dutch teased reflexively, although the fact that she was in the mood to tease meant it wasn't. "Go check on him if you're worried. Tell him he doesn't get paid if he doesn't wake up to help us with the handoff."

Johnny cracked a smile. "His loss."

Several minutes passed, with Johnny getting visibly more antsy. Dav hadn't been back on the team for very long, but it wasn't like him to sulk in his room when they had a job to finish. 

"Go check on him," Dutch said again, finally. She bumped her shoulder into Johnny's and he nodded and said, "Yeah, okay."

There was an oddly long silence, and then Johnny came back out to the common area, looking like he'd seen a ghost. "Dutch, you have to come see this."

Wordlessly, Dutch followed him back to the open door to Dav's cabin. Johnny's low-level panic was catching; in the three seconds it took to cross the space and look inside, any number of worst case scenarios flashed through her head.

The reality, if possible, was even worse.

"That's a baby," Dutch said, when she found herself able to speak.

"Oh good, I'm not hallucinating." Johnny slumped against the doorway. "Or wait, maybe it's bad."

The baby looked very small, very naked, and very real. It was lying on its back, half tangled up in the sheets in the center of the messy bunk and slowly kicking its bare legs. As they watched, it caught one of its feet in its hands, then made a little coughing whine of frustration when the foot slipped free.

"Definitely bad," Dutch agreed. "Hallucinations are definitely preferable to real, live, human babies."

Johnny nodded, mutely.

Dutch could count on one hand the things she knew about babies: they were stupidly fragile, couldn't talk, pooped a lot, and she was never ever going to have one. There had sometimes been babies at the harem where she grew up, but she stayed away. No one had ever taught her about babies, and besides, after Khlyen started tutoring her, it felt safer not to be around them. 

"Shit," she said, with feeling. Then, remembering their original purpose, "Where's D'avin?"

"No idea," Johnny said. He crept closer slowly, as if the baby were a ticking bomb. Carefully, he leaned over the bunk and extended one finger, which the baby enthusiastically grabbed. John's face eased. "Aw, I think he likes me!" He took a breath and wrinkled his nose. "And I think he peed in the bed. Fuck, what do we do now?"

"I don't know," Dutch said, from the safety of the doorway. "I don't know the first thing about babies. Where are his parents?"

-

A thorough sweep of the ship didn't turn up any stowaways, parental or otherwise. It also didn't turn up D'avin, who had definitely been on board when they'd all parted ways nine hours ago to sleep away the last leg of the journey. 

Dutch sat down on the floor next to Johnny and let out a frustrated sigh. "I don't get it. Someone must have, what, caught up to us in deep space, boarded the ship, dropped their infant off, and kidnapped Dav, all without waking us up or alerting Lucy? Who does that?"

"Lucy would definitely have told us if we were boarded," Johnny said. He fussed with the blanket nest he'd made for the baby in the middle of the common room floor. It looked like he'd pulled off all the clean sheets and blankets from both his and Dav's bunks, and possibly Dutch's as well. The baby had on one of Johnny's battered old t-shirts, which was comically large and fit like a very long dress, and seemed to be wearing one of Dav's undershirts as a makeshift diaper. His tiny fist was latched onto Johnny's finger like a vice; whenever Johnny tried to take his finger back, the baby's face would crumple and he'd start to fret.

A spaceship full of killjoys and an angry prisoner was definitely no place for a person that tiny. 

"This just doesn't make any sense. You don't think the guy downstairs had a baby when we took him in?"

Johnny gave her a level look. "Did he smuggle a baby on board under his normal-fitting jacket without any of us noticing, you mean?"

Dutch scrubbed her hands over her face. "Ugh, I know."

Johnny continued, implacable. "And then, not only that, but he escaped his bonds, planted his invisible baby in Dav's bed, and locked himself back up?"

"Okay, yes, I'm grasping at straws," Dutch said. "It's just that we'll be landing in ten minutes, we're on a deadline to do this handoff, and we're inexplicably missing a crewmember. And there's a baby."

The baby cooed and reached up to Dutch with his free hand. She frowned at him. 

Johnny tilted his head and frowned too. "I wonder..." he said, absently, and tugging his hand free with a soft apology, walked off toward his cabin. Dutch stared at the baby and tried to quash her rising swell of panic at John's absence. 

He returned a minute later carrying a battered old viewer. "Look at this."

Dutch looked at the pictures as Johnny paged through them. "It's more babies."

"It's one particular baby." He paused, as if that was supposed to be some big reveal, then sighed when Dutch just shook her head blankly. "It's Dav before I was born. You don't think there's a bit of a resemblance? Like, weirdly a lot of a resemblance?"

Dutch looked at the baby in the pictures again and shrugged. "I don't know, all I can tell is this one is maybe a little smaller. Babies all look the same to me."

"Hang on," Johnny said. Gingerly, he rolled the baby onto his side and pulled the too-loose neck of the shirt out of the way, revealing a tiny tan birthmark on the back of the baby's shoulder. "D'avin has a birthmark just like that," he said, settling the baby back down. 

Dutch stared at him. "So? Lots of babies have birthmarks."

"Lots of babies who showed up in my brother's bunk the same night he went missing?"

It was absurd. This whole thing was absurd. "What are you saying, Johnny?"

He put his hands up. "Nothing, it's just. An awful big coincidence." He stared at the baby, and Dutch stared at him some more. He met Dutch's eyes, looking as terrified as she felt. 

"People don't just turn into babies," Dutch said, shaking her head.

"No," Johnny agreed.

They both stared at the baby again, whose grumpy face did have some weird similarities to Dav's grumpy face, when you were looking for it. "What's that thing about the simplest explanation most likely being the right one?" Johnny asked.

Dutch found she was still shaking her head slowly, and made herself stop. "The most ridiculous explanation, more like." But it was hard to come up with anything else that so neatly accounted for the present situation. "I'm not calling him D'avin until we get, like, a DNA test. Just to be safe."

"Now approaching Westerly," Lucy chimed in, with impeccable timing. "Would one of you like to land us, or should I put us in orbit until you resolve the situation?"

"Lucy! Did you see anything happen last night?"

"No, John. When he first joined you, D'avin asked me not to monitor his cabin, he said it was 'creepy' to have a computer watching him sleep."

Johnny rolled his eyes. "Of course. Did you see anyone coming or going?"

"Negative. I'm putting us into orbit now."

Dutch scrambled to her feet. "No, Lucy, knock it off. I'll land, we can figure this out once the warrant is done."

-

It made the most sense to finish the warrant first, then deal with the whole baby situation. The thing was, there was a hostage and a giant case of tech; it was really a two person job. They had been counting on three, actually. Always good to have at least one person who didn't have both their hands full. 

Johnny looked over at the baby, who had finally been persuaded to trade John's finger for a plastic spoon. "Maybe Pawter can watch him?"

"In her medical clinic, where she's seeing patients? That sounds very safe," Dutch said.

"We can't just leave him alone here," Johnny said, reasonably. "And if we take him with us, whoever's holding him is basically useless."

Well, that was all inconveniently true.

"Would you like me to engage the infant safety protocol?" Lucy asked, into the pause.

Dutch stared up at the ceiling. "Why does it not surprise me that you have an infant safety protocol? Sure, go ahead and engage it."

"Stand by," Lucy said. For a moment nothing appeared to happen; then a column of force field extended up from the floor a few feet away and a soothing tune started playing from Lucy's speakers.

A moment passed, and then another, and nothing more happened. "That's it?" Johnny asked, echoing Dutch's own sentiments.

"The original plan for the protocol involved a mobile and some board books, but I can't exactly run errands," Lucy pointed out drily. 

"What happens if we put the baby in the force field?" Dutch asked. Her knowledge of child care was pretty thin, but it still seemed unwise to mix babies and containment fields.

"Nothing," Lucy said, then amended, "Probably nothing. It's on its lowest setting, it's safer than letting him get into things. This ship is full of weapons."

Johnny laughed. "Thanks, Lucy, but I think we'll pass on the baby jail for now. He's too little to get into anything on his own, anyway."

-

Dutch tested the cuffs securing the prisoner's hands to the crate handles one last time. It was a risky solution, and if they'd known this was going to happen, they wouldn't have gone for the extra joy for bringing in the thief, too, but well. Dutch had managed before she met Johnny. She would manage this one job. 

She paused on the ramp and looked back at Johnny. "You're sure you don't mind staying behind?" 

Johnny bounced the baby, who had started fretting again for no discernible reason and was now crying with determination. "Nothing I can't handle here. Simple drop off, right? You'll be back before we know it."

The prisoner, sensing distraction, made a bid for freedom. Dutch jammed her gun into his back, bringing him up short. "Not so fast, buddy. Don't think I won't shoot out your knee if I need to. This warrant doesn't say anything about what condition they want you in except 'alive.'"

"You could give me back my fucking private property and call it a day," the prisoner snarled.

"Alright, we're going," Dutch said, prodding the prisoner down the ramp. "See you soon, Johnny."

They made a strange procession through the streets, the prisoner complaining loudly with his hands tied to the crate, followed closely by Dutch with her gun drawn and trained on his knees. Old Town being what it was, they hardly drew a second glance. 

Their little caravan arrived at the drop point with barely two minutes to spare, and of course that was when their prisoner decided to make his escape. He got all of three paces before Dutch shot him in the foot and he and the crate crumpled to the ground with an ungainly crash. 

"Ouch," Dutch said. "Bet you wish you'd stayed still."

Before the prisoner could respond, a group of five or six cloaked figures emerged from a nearby alley and surrounded them. On an ordinary day, it barely would have registered, but Dutch felt a jolt of unease. This had better be part of the dropoff — not that she couldn't handle it, but with Dav missing and Johnny stuck back on the ship taking care of the mysterious infant who was possibly, with the smallest sliver of probability, in fact Dav, she didn't have time for an additional complication.

The person in the front of the group lowered her hood. "You're the killjoys?" 

Guardedly, Dutch nodded. "Just one of me, today." She waved her gun toward the loudly cursing prisoner. "That your stuff?"

The group leader gave both an appraising look. "Yes." 

The group — much less ominous when they weren't swooping out of an alley en masse —acted like they thought it was polite to stick around and chat, but Dutch excused herself as soon as the administrative details of completing the warrant and handing off the prisoner and property were dispensed with. 

Well, thank the trees one thing could go right today.

-

"I had no idea babies could poop so much," were the first words out of John's mouth when Dutch returned, less than an hour after she'd left. He was wearing different clothes than before and looked several degrees more frazzled. The baby was wrapped in a clean towel, tucked into the crook of Johnny's arm and sleeping with a grumpy expression on his face. Over John's shoulder, Dutch could see an improbably large pile of dirty laundry where the baby's little makeshift bed had been.

Experimentally, Dutch lifted her hand off her mouth and nose, but quickly replaced it. The air was just as foul in here as the first whiff she'd caught when climbing aboard. "It's your lucky day," she said, muffled, and handed Johnny the bag of stuff she'd picked up on her way back. It had taken forever to find that stuff. She'd always thought she knew Old Town pretty well, but she'd never had to shop for baby supplies there.

He rifled through it one-handed, pulling out the bundle of disposable diapers, and visibly sagged with relief. "It's like you read my mind. Can we read each other's minds now? It wouldn't be the weirdest thing that's happened today."

Dutch felt herself smiling. "It was an educated guess. I got some milk and a bottle, too, figured he'd get hungry at some point."

"You have no idea," Johnny said. "He got hungry almost as soon as you left. Or I think. He cried a lot and kept trying to suck on my fingers. Did you know all of the food we have in here needs teeth to eat it?"

Dutch laughed. "Well, usually we all have teeth."

"True." Johnny looked down at the baby, a soft expression warming his face. "Do you think it would be worse to wake him up or worse to let him keep sleeping hungry?"

"Hungry is worse," Dutch said immediately, a bit harsher than she meant it to come out. She made an effort to gentle her tone and added, "He can always fall asleep again after he eats."

Johnny, because he was a perfect, beautiful soul, didn't pry. He just nodded and said "You're the boss," and went to find something to heat up the milk in.

-

They managed to sneak the baby into the Royal without arousing too much suspicion, thanks to a bulky roughspun poncho Johnny had lying around from an old job. Dutch hadn't seen much point in sneaking around — they were pretty well-respected as killjoys, and if someone didn't like seeing them with a baby, they could answer to Dutch — but the baby was John's maybe-brother, and if he was feeling a bit overprotective, Dutch was with him, no questions asked.

Pree's eyes widened in surprise when he saw what Johnny was carrying, but he just laughed and said, "You know I don't care much about the legal drinking age in here, but don't you think this is going a little too far?"

"Very funny," Dutch said. "Is Pawter in?"

"Oh, she won't want to miss this." Pree called up the stairs, and a minute later Pawter came down, drying off her hands on her pants. 

"This had better be an emergency. I was with a patient."

Johnny carefully set the baby down on the bar in front of them, where he made some ambiguous sputtering noises and several attempts to roll himself over, but ultimately stayed put. Johnny shook out his arms with a groan of relief and said, "He's heavier than he looks," at Dutch's raised eyebrow. To Pawter, he said, "We have a little problem."

Pawter looked between Johnny and Dutch, then at the baby, then back at the two of them. "Okay, wow. I have several questions."

"Oh, gross, Johnny's like a brother to me," Dutch said, at the same time as Johnny said, "It's not what you're thinking!"

"Believe it or not, 'how did you and Dutch have a white baby in the five days since I last saw you' was not one of my questions," Pawter said.

"Thanks," Dutch said. 

Pree, who had been playing upside-down peekaboo to the baby's great delight, butted in. "Speaking of brothers, where's yours, John? He's missing all the fun."

Johnny pursed his lips. "This is going to sound crazy, but. We think that's D'avin."

"Wow," Pawter said again, after an awkward silence. "First, that does sound crazy; second, suppose I do believe you — which I don't — but even if I did, what could have caused this? Are you messing with evil genius scientists in your spare time now?"

 

"Nothing could have caused this," Dutch said, exasperated. "Dav was fine just last night, and even before that, nothing _happened_. It was a perfectly normal job."

Down the bar, someone called for a refill; Pree held up a hand. "Not one word until I get back."

As soon as he got back, Johnny recounted everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, Dutch butting in to supply potentially relevant details. There weren't very many.

"Look," Johnny said, when they wound down and Pawter still had her arms crossed. "I know there has to be a logical explanation. But the birthmark, the timing, it's too much of a weird coincidence. Can you do a DNA test or something on him to at least rule it out?"

Pawter sighed fondly. "Anything for you, Johnny. Do either of you happen have a sample of Dav's genetic material on you?"

Dutch flattened her lips and produced the vial of beard clippings she'd painstakingly collected from the bathroom while Johnny'd been putting the baby into a real diaper. She'd gotten the better deal, but still, this whole thing was so gross. "Will this work?"

"Okay, guess we're really doing this," Pawter said. "Let me just —" she took a swab out of her jacket pocket and efficiently swabbed the inside of the baby's cheek when he opened his mouth to make more noise. 

"How long does it take?" Johnny asked.

"Testing for a simple DNA match? Not long. I have to go finish up with my patient, though. I'll be back down as soon as I can."

-

Pree scooped the baby up after Pawter disappeared back up the stairs with the samples. He tucked the baby against his chest and bounced him gently up and down, looking entirely more at ease than Johnny had. "What's your name, baby?" he crooned, sing-song. "Is it D'avin? Are you D'avin?" He booped the baby on the nose each time he said the name, making him laugh and grab at his hand.

"Ugh, don't encourage him," Dutch said. She was pretty sure she was talking about John, not the baby who was definitely not Dav. 

Johnny was watching Pree with his head tilted to one side. "How'd you get so good with babies? He hasn't laughed for me even once since we found him."

Pree paused his game with the baby and raised an eyebrow. "That would be telling." The baby took advantage of the break and grabbed for Pree's dangling earring, shrieking triumphantly. "No, no, no, not for you," Pree said, not even wincing as he pried the tiny hand off his earring. 

Dutch shook her head, smiling. "One of these days you've got to tell us about all your mysterious past lives, Pree. I'll buy the drinks."

"Better start saving up now. If there's an amount of hokk that gets my stories out of me, no one's found it yet." Down at the other end of the room, two patrons stood up and kicked their chairs back; from the sound of their raised voices, they were spoiling for a fight. Pree sighed regretfully and handed the baby back to John. "I love you both, but I have a bar to run."

-

Pawter came back down from her clinic not much later, but refused to tell them anything until they'd sequestered themselves at a table in the back. "It's not good," she said, and handed over a readout with a bunch of color-coded lines. Johnny flicked his eyes over it and went rather dramatically white before handing the readout to Dutch. 

Dutch blinked at it for a few moments, but it stayed a meaningless collection of lines. "What am I supposed to be seeing here?" 

"It's the DNA test results. Ninety-nine point nine-eight percent certainty for a match. I can keep it running longer and we can wait for one hundred percent certainty," she said, almost apologetic. "But it's pretty conclusive."

Johnny looked a little stunned. "You know, I don't think I actually wanted to be right."

Dutch felt like she should be stunned, but it was taking a while to filter down to her. She squinted into the baby's face. Johnny had sat him down on the slightly sticky table, and he was alternating between clapping his hands and grabbing at Johnny's beard. There might be a passing resemblance to adult D'avin under all that wispy hair and baby fat, but she might just as easily be imagining it. 

Pawter shook her head. "I still don't understand. I've seen weird tech and designer gene therapy, but I've never seen anything that can just reverse-age someone back to a baby."

"We didn't run into any weird tech," Johnny said, absently removing the baby's — D'avin's, apparently — hand from his nose. 

"There was the tech we brought back for the warrant," Dutch said slowly, as it dawned on her. "Not that we used it or anything, but if that guy hadn't turned it off before he packed it away, who knows what it might have been doing in there."

Johnny swore under his breath. "And of course it's long gone now so we can't check it. Did they say what it was when you dropped it off?"

"Shield generator for their community. Some kind of mining collective outside the quad. They wanted to tell me all about it, actually, but I wanted to get back to you and Dav."

"Doesn't sound like something that could do this," Pawter said, dubiously. "There was really nothing else?"

Johnny shook his head. "No. Except for that security field, but we all got caught in it. Dutch and I didn't turn into babies overnight."

"It wouldn't be the first thing D'avin responded differently to," Dutch pointed out. "Though it would be the most extreme."

Pree extricated himself from behind the bar and came over to their table with teapot and a mismatched collection of mugs. "Pawter told me," he said, forestalling any questions. "What are you going to do?"

Dutch accepted the mug when he handed it to her, but what she could really use was a good strong shot of hokk. Several shots. "We could go back through the field," she suggested.

"We don't know if it works both ways," Johnny said, hunching protectively over D'avin. "It could just make him even younger. What if it turns him into an embryo? I don't have the right equipment to incubate an embryo."

D'avin shrieked and slapped the table. A patron at a nearby table turned and opened his mouth to complain; Pree leveled him a hard look and said, "Turn back around right now and the Company doesn't have to hear about what you deal out back every Wednesday." The man grumbled and turned back to his group.

"You don't think he can understand us, do you?" Johnny tickled Dav's feet, provoking another shriek and some energetic kicking. 

Pawter shrugged. "You'd have to ask a child development expert, which I am not." She put her mug down and squinted at the baby. "Although...was he sitting on his own when you brought him in earlier?"

They all looked at Dav, who grabbed at a nearby shot glass. Dutch moved it out of his reach and he lunged for it, nearly tipping himself over. 

"He does seem a lot more...mobile...than he was this morning," Johnny said doubtfully.

"This morning he just kind of lay on his back and waved his arms and legs around," Dutch supplied. "Is that normal?"

"For an infant, maybe, but I'd have thought this one was a bit older," Pree said. He picked D'avin up and hoisted him experimentally a few times. "Either he's got a really full diaper, or he's heavier than he was when you first came in here."

Johnny grimaced. "Oh, you'd know if he had a full diaper. This morning was. A revelation."

"So what — we just wait for him to grow up again, however long that takes? It could be months. _Years_. We can't raise a child and be killjoys at the same time." Dutch broke off, aware of how that sounded. "Johnny, I know he's your brother, but this is our livelihood. There has to be a better way."

"Seems safer than double-de-aging him," Johnny said. "If he's re-aging at an accelerated rate, maybe we won't even have to wait very long."

Dutch tilted her head, dubious. 

"And hey, if it takes a little while, we'll get by. We don't have to upgrade Lucy's stabilizers right away, and I'm sure we have friends who could babysit for us if we have to take a couple jobs to tide us over. We're not breaking up the team over my dumb baby brother."

Dutch smiled and ducked her head. She didn't deserve Johnny, but somehow she had him. "Bet you're not going to get tired of saying 'baby brother' anytime soon."

Johnny grinned. "Going to milk it for all it's worth."

"It might be a moot point. I don't have any kind of advanced equipment, but I can run a few basic scans and weigh him," Pawter volunteered. "We probably won't be able to figure out what's going on, but we can at least get an idea of how fast he's growing."

It seemed like the safest bet. And Dav did look bigger than he did when they found him, now that it had been pointed out. Johnny and Dutch followed Pawter back up to her clinic and hovered uselessly around while Pawter ran her tests.

"Have you fed him?" she asked, when Dav started fussing in the bowl-shaped baby scale.

"We're not monsters," Dutch said. "We gave him some milk before we came here."

"Was that...not right?" Johnny asked, seeing Pawter's face fall.

"Give him something that won't stunt his growth next time." Pawter handed them a stack of formula packets, and made them promise to pay to replace what Dav drank. "I only keep these on hand to give away when people can't afford it," she explained.

-

By late afternoon, it was clear even without Pawter's measurements that Dav was getting bigger. They finally had to leave the Royal when he figured out crawling and immediately motored off to grab at a stranger's dangling ray gun. 

"I am holding this over your head forever," Johnny said to Dav as they walked back to the ship. "The first and only time we get kicked out of the Royal, and it's your fault."

"I still don't think he understands us," Dutch said, smiling. 

Johnny laughed. "Doesn't matter, I'll tell him about it later."

Back at the ship, D'avin took to exploring with a vengeance. Dutch had never appreciated just how many things there were to get into on board until there was a tiny human making a concerted effort to getting into all of them.

"I'll keep an eye on him," Dutch said, as Johnny slouched down in a chair with a groan. "You've been doing everything so far."

"No, you don't have to." Johnny scrubbed his hands over his face and shifted his weight as if to get up. "Like you said, he's my brother."

Dutch sat down on the floor to block D'avin off from crawling under a nearby console. "And you're both my partners. If I got incapacitated somehow — none of us could have expected _this_ , but you know, in a normal way — you and Dav would take care of me, right?"

"Of course, Dutch, you know we would. We're a team." 

"And teams take care of each other," Dutch said. She lifted D'avin onto her lap a little gingerly. "Even when some members of the team turn into scary little monsters who can't talk and don't know what's good for them, right, Dav?" She waved his hands as if in agreement and Johnny laughed.

"Scary monster, huh? Who's a scary monster?" 

They went back and forth like that for a while, gently interrogating D'avin in baby talk, until Dutch put her face in her hands and groaned, still laughing. "I can't believe I'm — not one word of this gets out to anyone, okay?"

Johnny cracked a smile. "I don't think Dav will tell on us. Will you, monsterbaby?" In response, Dav let out a long string of musical vowel sounds and tried to climb out of Dutch's lap. 

Dutch groaned. "How long until he starts talking for real, do you think?"

"Maybe soon. You can basically see him getting bigger now."

They fed him some of Pawter's formula, and by the time they were eating their own dinner, Johnny was able to coach him into saying random strings of sounds that sounded roughly approximate to their names. 

By the time Dutch was about ready to suggest they call it an early night and turn in, D'avin was pulling himself up on crates, bulkheads, or anything else they would let him get within reaching distance of, and launching himself out to toddle across the room until he ran out of inertia. 

"It's getting faster, isn't it?" Dutch asked as Johnny chased after Dav.

Johnny nodded. "It definitely is. At this rate he'll probably sleep right through his awkward pre-teen years." He sounded a little rueful. "What I wouldn't give to be the older one in that equation for an hour." Dutch raised an eyebrow and Johnny said, "Hey, you didn't see what he put me through."

Eventually, Dav tired himself out, but not before he was able to make it from one side of the ship to the other under his own power. 

Dutch considered him. "Do you think he's outgrown formula yet?"

Johnny shrugged. "Beats me. Why?"

"If I were going to grow twenty some-odd years in one night, I'd want a bedtime snack." Dutch went over and started mixing up a new bottle.

Dav's eyes were drooping by the time he finished it. Johnny scooped him up and carried him to his cabin. "Want me to tell you a story? One time I was looking for my brother — great guy, you might know him — and I tracked him to this big spaceship in the middle of nowhere —" his words became muffled as he moved out of the main cabin, but the sound of his voice rose and fell comfortingly as he put D'avin to bed.

Twenty minutes later, he came back out, yawning himself. "Finally out. I think it's safe to go to sleep now."

Dutch felt sleepier than she could remember being in years, even though they hadn't really done anything all day. "Good. I'm more exhausted than I was after that one warrant where we had to run continuous surveillance for thirty hours. Think we should leave him a note or something?"

"Eh." Johnny waved a hand. "He'll figure it out."

-

Far too early next morning, Dutch was woken up by Dav's voice — his very loud, adult voice — echoing through the ship. "You guys will never believe what a weird dream I had last night."

Dutch groaned and pulled her pillow over her head. Dav's footsteps grew closer, evidently returning to his cabin after finding no one else awake. 

She had just about fallen back to sleep when she heard, "Hey, why is there a diaper in my bed? And where did my sheets go, guys? Guys?"

There was a vague thump that might have been Johnny kicking the wall and a faint "Shut _up_ , Dav."

Well, this probably wasn't going to go away on its own. Time to get up and face the music.


End file.
